2w ago

Raspberry Pi as LowCost PLC

Studying mechatronics engineering I am very interested in trying to use my spare RPi that I have lying around as a PLC to get better at programming.

Since I don't have the money to buy an industrial Controller I thought this would be a great fit. I still want to have a touch of industrial flair and I am looking into connecting a Beckhoff ethercat coupler like the EK1100 or the BK1120 to the Raspberry.

Has anyone testde this out? The question mainly is, if the raspi can function as an Ethercat master?

(Yes i run the codesys Raspi Runtime on the Pi :) )

2 comments

I have run an ethercat master on Raspian. I used the Etherlab Ethercat Master..
It worked ok but when I tried to add a ui to run as well, it was too much and then things got really slow..
So I went back to running it on NUC boards instead. The ones I have are quad core 2.4 ghz intel machines.
- I had the chance to test it with the codesys raspberry package this weekend. Worked surprisingly easy. I however did not try somplicated stuff. I’m interested how codesys on the RPi will perform for heavier tasks and visu. Codesys is pretty lightweight so we’ll see.